Albert Einstein and Faith

While reading Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus, I came across this enlightening little quote by Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld:

In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism.

And so we are left with theories and models of reality that cannot be proven.  And so we, even if the best of scientists, are left with faith.

In other news, check out this NPR article about the discovery of particles that may move faster than light, thus perhaps leaving E=MC^2 as an old, incorrect theory.

Dallas Willard: One Who Knows His God.

Dallas Willard 

Dallas Willard died this morning after announcing Stage 4 Cancer on Monday.

Dallas--a USC Professor of Philosophy, a man whose writing has greatly magnified my view of beauty and goodness and hope in this life, and a lover and beloved of God--awakened early this morning into the full experience of the brilliantly abundant life with God.  His last two words were,

“Thank you.”

This morning, as his life-light dawned into full day, I think Dallas was welcomed into rest and love and praise by the voice of God; a voice which he once described as recognizable through its "spirit of exalted peacefulness and confidence, of joy, of sweet reasonableness and of goodwill."

And I think the voice sounded something like this: "Well done, good and faithful servant."


Here's something he wrote about the intersection of God and love and death, from Hearing God, 1984:

"Thomas à Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, 'A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.' The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr's stake or noose into a place of coronation.

As Saint Augustine has written, when we come to our final home, 'there we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.  This is what shall be in the end without end.'  It is this for which the human soul was made."

Thank you, Dallas.